Ten minutes into the third series of The Traitors and I was already infuriated. Volunteering to get off the train? Sacrificing yourself for the greater good, keeping money in the prize pot, allowing the other greedy, self-serving vultures to continue to the castle and actually take part in the programme while you head back to the English border with your suitcase like an abandoned evacuee?
“Well it separates the wheat from the chaff doesn’t it?” I declared to no one. “They’d never make it as a Traitor if they’re willing to quit so they shouldn’t be in it anyway.”
But, erm, becoming a Traitor is not actually the aim of the game. I’d forgotten – because a brilliant Traitor won the last series (Harry, the greatest TV villain of this decade), and because a terrible Faithful won the first (Meryl, who had no strategy, no judge of character, no demonstrable self-control and got literally every single thing wrong) – that the vast majority of Traitors contestants are supposed to try and win not by becoming a Traitor and successfully deceiving everybody else, but by accurately sniffing them out.
I’m not convinced anyone will do this, because whenever any Faithful with half a brain cell manages to think critically and raises concerns in the exact forum intended for this purpose – the round table – their fellow Faithfuls grow suspicious and banish them, and if they don’t, the Traitors wait a few days before finishing them off. But in theory, getting off the train might not take these three pre-lapsarian Faithfuls out of the running after all, but prove their ultimate fidelity and secure them as pure Faithfuls poised to re-enter later.
Who knows? The Traitors always feels like producers (or Claudia Winkleman herself – much of the magic of the programme rests on us believing that every decision is hers alone) are making up the rules and twists as they go along to keep it unpredictable.
One thing was easy to predict this series, though. The first three Traitors Claudia selected were women.
Last year, as the male Traitors recruited man after man, because they respected or trusted or valued them more, and murdered woman after woman, because they saw them as weaker or less important, the late-night clandestine hooded war councils began to feel like an old boys’ club.
“Another man, good, it’s like the olden days,” a withering Claudia eventually said, in a soundbite much-repeated and applauded, but which was not really a joke. She spoke about it on Woman’s Hour, implying that this pattern, and the fact that the older contestants were leaving the game first, made the format “problematic”.
Starting this series off with three women – Armani, Linda and Minah – is an intentional redress. But what happens next is out of her control.
Unscripted television always runs a risk of exposing and platforming unconscious biases. Look at Love Island, where black islanders are so often the last to be coupled up. Or The Apprentice, where men constantly snatch leadership roles, sideline women, delegate menial tasks to them, and on which the traditional “girls” and “boys” teams are now forcibly mixed.
The Traitors brings this into even sharper focus. For Traitors and Faithfuls, the entire objective is for them to decide who is honest and who is lying, who is good and who is bad, who is weak and who is strong, and all they have to go off is presentation and perception.
Charlotte pretending to be Welsh because the Welsh are deemed more trustworthy? Leanne pretending to be a nail technician rather than an Army veteran so people underestimate her? Lisa the Anglican priest taking her dog collar off? It’s all to pre-empt other people’s assumptions.
The only way to take a game like The Traitors seriously is by really believing that Traitors are inherently bad, and Faithfuls inherently good. All of a sudden, this well-cast mix of once random personalities – real or fake – are picked apart and everything about them used as evidence of their morality. And no matter how hard Claudia tries to intervene, she can do nothing to stop it when the more sinister biases and accepted mistruths rise to the fore.
Women are not weaker than men. Displaying emotions does not make women less resilient. Women are not less strategic. But the world still likes a witch hunt, and we have already seen these insidiously weaponised at the round table. When Elen, the actually Welsh Faithful, insisted there were “strong women Traitors this year”, she grew emotional in her indignance, and was crucified and banished.
Charlotte was targeted because she dared say she felt “relaxed” – a confession that would surely have made a man look more confident but was repeatedly brought up until she cried, and was punished. And within hours the unity Claudia confected with her three Traitors and their “woman power” had broken down and they were turning on each other.
This year’s Traitors is no old boys’ club – not yet at least. But in a game that is all about betrayal, appearances, guesswork and doubt, there is no way to prevent your gender being held against you – everything else about you will be.
